The regional road to LU’s growth and local credibility

John Tummon muses on the question of Left Unity in the regions

Lambeth LU’s amendment No 26 would have moved LU towards a federal structure, whilst at the same time seriously cutting our regional capacity, in the name of strengthening branches; I was very pleased to see it defeated but, after that, the Wigan amendment was remitted to what felt a bit like the long grass, leaving LU with mixed messages from the conference about the balance we want between centre and localities.

Part of the democratic accountability that has been eroded within the Labour Party has been the growing tendency of the centre to impose its – mostly Oxbridge – candidates on local parties, the issue which is probably lurking somewhere in the murky depths of the Falkirk affair. If we want to become credible advocates of radical democracy we need to do much better than that.

Even a cursory attempt to think through what a Left or Radical political geography of England might look like starts to reveal just how important regional variation is and how important it is that the balance of our structure enables us to become as well adapted to it as we can.

Even the media’s monthly round-up of ONS economic statistics, for all its obvious faults, shows us regularly the contrast between different English regions in house prices, unemployment rates and the percentage of children in poverty, but this merely scratches the surface and does not amount to a Left or Radical political geography; it is just the shallow database for sound-bite politics which pervades Westminster and its attendant courtiers.

So let’s look under the bonnet, at an England in which each region had fairly distinctive pre-neoliberal economies; in places like Yorkshire and Humberside, the East Midlands and the North East, the loss of coal mining and the way in which it was lost casts a long ideological shadow which affects the way in which people there are receptive to radical Left politics today. Even under neoliberalism, New Labour located big public employers in certain regions, such that the Coalition’s attacks on the public sector are particularly felt in those places more than in others. Shipbuilding, dock work and related employment was important in some port cities like East London, Sunderland and Bristol, producing different traditions of organisation and unionisation to places where the car industry became established. Farming, the tourist industry and arms manufacture are much more important in some regions than others and each generated a distinctive ideological baggage which has been handed down to generations who have grown up there in neoliberal times.

These patterns start to explain why taking opposition to fox-hunting and ring roads has been easier in some places yet met barriers in others, why workers in some areas have been receptive to CND but openly hostile in others.

Then there is the ethnic and religious map of England, showing that some minority communities are well represented in some regions yet virtually absent in others, with their varying traditions and beliefs giving a different texture to local race relations. Respect (and UKIP) has found it easier to build in some places than in others because of this regional variation. Large parts of London have a degree of ethnic diversity that gives a distinctive character to society, culture and political activity there and nowhere else is this the case in quite the same way. In many places, there are just one or two areas where people descended from specific post-war immigrant groups are abundant and there are still large swathes of ethnic homogeneity in some parts of England.

London’s working class are in serious danger of being socially cleansed from the capital’s centre, as the 2,700 sterling millionaires and estimated 10,000 bankers who have an annual income over £500,000 achieve a growing social exclusivity, with government support; nowhere else is this happening and nowhere else are housing and other property prices driving Osborne’s spurious recovery.

Finally, within each region there are one or two cities, usually each with one or more universities and an ex-student population, among which we often find a more bohemian Left, more influenced by feminism and gay or environmental politics than is the case in the towns in the same region. Political work in these two types of places has for decades needed to take account of local social and cultural factors; parachutist city Lefties have been given short shrift on many an occasion.

What all this means is that intelligence-led LU political activity is the way to go, must take account of this variety and find the best way of doing so. It means that LU needs to move on from the statement in one of the more formulaic platforms that “the interests of the working class are basically the same everywhere”; this may be true at a macro-theoretical level, but its application in a decontextualised way to actually-existing working class communities and workforces is the road to mutual incomprehension when activist meets worker.

I worked for 27 years in local and regional race equality and, throughout, could not help being fully aware of the continuing tensions between central and local perspectives. I know it is not an exact analogy with what faces LU, but it is close enough to enable me to make the argument I want to set out. The essence of this is that the regional offices of the now-defunct CRE functioned as the main protection and support for the borough-based local race equality bodies, in the face of grand plans, a ‘one size fits all’ perspective and other mistaken assumptions emanating from the Commission’s London HQ. These regional offices were also best placed to identify and work with local people and provide the support in order to set up new local race equality bodies in towns where none had existed before; crucially for my analogy, they were much better placed to do this than were the neighbouring local bodies, particularly where the neighbour’s political and human geography (and the assumptions arising from that) differed in key respects, which was usually the case.

The racial equality pyramid worked best when the centre provided a menu of the types of work it wanted carried out locally and the regional CRE offices brought the local bodies together to decide how this could best be interpreted and provided for within the region. This typically meant that some national priorities were only addressed in some places within a given region, where they were relevant, whereas others were pursued throughout the region, with enthusiasm.

None of this would have been possible without significant resources being located at the regional level, which leads me to section 17 c) (Finance) of the Constitution, which was never discussed at the founding conference but seems to have been passed, by implication, as part of the final vote on the document as a whole. This clause says that “income will be divided between the national organisation and local / regional activities according to the following formula, subject to review and agreement of national conference from time to time: national office 75%; region 5%; branch 20%.

This breakdown means that the regional financial allocation will probably cover not much more than the travel costs of delegates from branches meeting on a regional basis.

Now clause 8 d) (Regional Structures) of our Constitution, also not discussed at the founding conference, sets out 3 roles for the role of regional committees:

1. Coordinating and prioritising campaigning and organisational activities
2. Assisting in the creation and building of branches
3. Encouraging political education

The first role is really best thought of as split into two, giving regional committees 4 roles. I would add a 5^th:

5. Supporting the further development of branches and branch activity.

The money allocated to this crucial set of roles is simply inadequate. Without it we are likely to flounder, with new branches in towns being set up with the ‘help’ and ongoing ‘support’ of LU city-based branches, whose political assumptions will in many cases not be transferable, because of the varied political geography within as well as between each of our regions.

The next developmental stage for LU needs to be working hard in working class communities and workplaces, to build a solid base and a reputation for learning and listening to people and reflecting their experiences, hopes and fears in what we say publicly. That is the only way to develop sustainable resistance to neoliberal austerity. This has to involve creating new branches, so that we no longer have some regions, like the North East, in which branches barely exist on the ground. Some significant places – many with populations over a quarter of a million – are still without an LU branch, and we need a strong regional structure to be able to set up the kind of branches that will be sustainable and – crucially – capable of embedding themselves within local working class communities and workplaces. There is also some way to go among quite a few existing branches in terms of becoming embedded in this way and moving this forward needs to involve learning from relevant best practice elsewhere – either within or outside the same region. This, in turn, demands that regional committees have the resources to make this happen and are well networked within the organisation as a whole.

I am putting this forward for discussion – a discussion that did not happen at the founding conference – in the hope that it produces an informal consensus on the website that is then recognised by our interim national leadership and reflected as well as it can be in our organisational development over the next 4 months, as well as in a motion to the first conference.